


Thirteen Years

by radishface



Series: Chapter X [2]
Category: After School (Band), JBJ (Band), K-pop, Produce 101 (TV)
Genre: Cheating, F/M, Older Woman/Younger Man, Rare Characters, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:13:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radishface/pseuds/radishface
Summary: “When she is bone tired of being alone, when all she wants is someone to pull her close and worship the ground she walks on, and one like Kim Sanggyun who’s all eager glinty eyes and sidelong grins and a body like hard silk comes along you just take your chance.”Kahi takes a shine to Kim Sanggyun. Episodic; each chapter stands alone.





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

He couldn’t see the blame in what he’d done. He said, “it’s not serious with her, and you got your husband anyway, so I’m pretty sure we’re even.”

 

When Park Jiyoung gets angry the Gyeongsang words come tumbling out like the heat from the blistering southeastern summers. When Sanggyun gets angry the Jeolla dialect comes out hard and fast like guns going off in a demonstration. _P-p-p-pow._

 

Who knew better than she that he had a weak spot for any older woman who’d smile twice at him? He couldn’t help it. It was the way he was made, just like she was the way she was made: coming apart with those thick, wet kisses and how big he got. Like a moth to flame for him out of his clothes, after the thick layers of hoodie and shirt and undershirt and the try-hard cologne from his new girlfriend was his true scent, and she dug deep for that freshness of skin which was like the smell of a freshly torn grass after a night of rain.

 

Anyway, there was something untouchable about everybody and if you wanted to know it then you had to know how to get it. And when her husband is traveling again for god knows how long this time and left her with the screaming baby and the sulking nanny she’s sure he’s fucking nine ways past ten she gets to it. When she is bone tired of being alone, when all she wants is someone to pull her close and worship the ground she walks on, and one like Kim Sanggyun who’s all eager glinty eyes and sidelong grins and a body like hard silk comes along you just take your chance.

 

 

#

 

Born on Christmas Day, her name was Park Jiyoung but now it was only in five places: her birth certificate; her school records; her ID card; her passport; her marriage certificate.

 

As the times changed, so did she. In everyday life, she went by her stage name.

 

#

 

  
She was a mentor and a coach on a reality competition show that output a boy band. One-hundred and one boys jostled and bested with each other and made charming smiles for the country across twelve episodes to be in the final group of eleven boys that would sing and dance and tour the world.

 

It was just something that was supposed to keep her busy. Between a screaming baby boy and a husband who ignored her it was a good thing to be busy. Who knew that it would become the first thing that she looked forward to in the morning and the last thing she thought about at night?

 

#

 

  
After dropping out of college and running away from home and being a backup dancer for ten years and sleeping with all the wrong people Park Jiyoung finally debuted in the industry when she was twenty-nine. She got married when she was thirty-six and had her baby the same year. She was a crone by industry standards but she kept a tight smile and didn’t frown and that made it so the wrinkles didn’t appear unless she laughed. Not laughing unless you absolutely had to was a specialty of hers. She got a reputation for being severe but it made her more of a catch.

 

The only man who could have her was the one who made her laugh.

 

#

 

  
Her husband was the CEO of a cell phone case company. He had inherited it from his co-founder after his co-founder went AWOL in the Philippines after their series B-funding and had come back spouting hippie shit and decrying the patriarchy. Like many men who had studied enormously hard in school only to realize that life was waiting for them with all of its temptations and riches, once Jiyoung’s husband came into his own money he became an aesthete and a connoisseur of rare whiskeys and an attendee at celebrity parties. He was number 17 in a list of 50 of Korea’s Most Eligible Bachelors by the dailies which was how he caught Jiyoung’s eye and how she caught his. After all, she was the centerfold that month.

 

When they first slept together, he made her wear the same maid costume. For someone who was approaching thirty-six and as lonely as a lone crow on a telephone pole with increasing frequency looking for a way out of the singing and dancing life it was a request that she obliged.

 

#  


 

  
For their one-hundredth day of seeing one another he presented her with a red Series 5 BMW and a key wrapped in a crimson satin bow. She turned up the music and she drove it as proudly as any cowboy would have ridden a broken bronco. Six months later they were married. The wedding was small and in Maui. Looking at him through the veil and getting the ring placed on her finger was the happiest she had ever been in all her thirty-six years of life on this planet.

 

#

 

  
Catching up with her girlfriends in the city she realized that it would be sad if all she got in life with her beautiful face was a big ring and a rich husband and a nice car. So that night, they made a baby. When the baby came to nine months later she was more in love than ever but the baby knew nothing and didn’t understand a thing.

 

Park Jiyoung loved her baby boy but her husband didn’t really yet. He’d told her that he would probably only grow to love it once it started speaking the language and making sense but it didn’t make it sting any less.

 

#

 

  
She was a senior in the industry by now and a success by all definitions. It was okay to be a crone when your beautiful face got you the big ring and the rich husband and the nice car and the bouncing baby boy. Now people knew what to call you and where to place you. Park Jiyoung wore Balenciaga and none of it was sponsored.

 

She sat at the mentor’s panel and evaluated the boys as they came in for their auditions. They were all trainees but some of them were failing idols who were coming on the show for their last gasp of air. Some of them she knew but most of them she didn’t. She was struck by their diversity and how different they were since she had found her way into the world of song and dance and how the standards had changed.

 

In their interviews many of the boys were asked what their ideal types were and many of them answered older women. It gave Park Jiyoung pause.

 

Even when she was younger she used to like them younger because they listened and they complied and they looked at her as not just a fuck. She hated the way many of the older men in the world of song and dance would treat her and her colleagues like meat but that was just the way things were.

 

But maybe it wasn’t the way things were anymore. After the fifth interview she watched where the rapper her junior by thirteen years known as Kim Sanggyun told the camera with a charming sidelong moon-eyed smile that he didn’t care what age his girl was as long as she was someone he could respect, she began to wonder if maybe she was born in the wrong time. She began to wonder if now that she had the ring and the husband and the car and the boy maybe she could finally be herself.

 

 

#

 

  
At the tender age of twenty-three Kim Sanggyun had taken on the kind of good-natured youthful masculinity like a country farmhand who had only the roughest idea of his own handsomeness. He was finely muscled without an ounce of fat. He had a cut, cruel-looking face and a thin mouth that only knew only how to grin crooked. Therefore it was funny when he was sorted into a group that had to cover a song that was reknowned for being one of the most naïf wide-eyed bushy-tailed songs in the repertoire.

 

Jiyoung told him that he needed to scrap the cheese. That if he tried, he could probably seduce older women very well. She liked the way he looked when his ears went bright red and a grin pleased and embarrassed flushed across his face. _Me_? His face said. _Is she talking about me?_

 

She laughed.

 

 

#

 

  
Jiyoung thinks that if someone touched him in his love spot, if someone smiled a smile at him that told him to come here boy, if someone got him turned on, if someone lay down with him, then that mouth like a paper cut would open wide and exhale in jagged breaths ghosting hot over you.

 

 

#

 

  
The baby slept in the car seat. They should have been back an hour ago but they weren’t. Groceries sweated in the baking heat of the trunk but up in the driver’s seat Park Jiyoung felt no guilt, only drowsiness.

 

Waves of heat rose from the asphalt of the parking lot. She came to a stop. Even with the heat Kim Sanggyun was waiting outside the Hunus company studio in a pair of tight black jeans with a tears in the knees and a grey hoodie that hung from him like a sack.

 

At the start of the summer he was eliminated from the show and was re-absorbed into his agency. Back to the world of practice and training and away from the cameras. Two months ago he was eliminated last month from the show and when he came off the stage eyes red and wet he walked up to her afterward when she was alone and told her that he had feelings for her and he thought she should know.

 

Sanggyun got in the car with his lips quivering but trying to be cool, real cool. Park Jiyoung smiled cool behind big sunglasses so he couldn’t see her expression. She was waiting. Thinking. Just lunch. She was the mentor. The baby was here with them. It was just lunch.

 

 

#

 

  
Three times they had lunch and the third time Park Jiyoung left the baby with the nanny. Three times they had lunch and the third time it turned into going to the bookshop and then coffee and then dinner and then it was the end of the day with the sun regretfully deepening its orange and painting the sky a damned shade of red.

 

Park Jiyoung drove Kim Sanggyun back to his company studio but then made the wrong turn and another wrong turn and ended up at the riverfront near Yeouido Park. She switched off the engine but left the music on some kind of American R&B and they talked about what made a star a star in different parts of the world.

 

There was a lull in the tracks when the song switched to the next one and Kim Sanggyun shaking asked her if this was all right. Because she was married and his feelings for her hadn’t changed.

 

She took a long time to say it but then she said that hers had. She said it in a voice so quiet he had to hold his breath to hear it but maybe he was already anyway. Because when she looked up to look at him she saw that on his face was all the hope in his world choiced at her in a corona made even hotter by the two of them baking in the lingering summer of the Series 5 until Jiyoung couldn’t stand it anymore.

 

She unbuckled her seatbelt and then his and put her hand on his zipper the same time she reached for his neck to pull him in to put his waiting mouth to hers. He was thirteen years younger than her and yet he loved her and that made her feel like time in this lonely world didn’t mean anything at all.

 

She milked Kim Sanggyun slow to the white noise of American music until he came with a choking incredulous god-fearing sigh and then she did it again.

 

 

#

 

  
So when she caught the new try-hard smell on him they fought and then they fucked desperately and fearfully in her office on the 4th floor at Pledis headquarters after everyone else had left. As they put on their clothes again and straightened themselves out she told him to meet her at the Westin in Gwangju in a month. He should come wearing something that didn’t look like him.

 

The night before she left she bounced her baby boy up and down for a whole three hours, every peek-a-boo a new peek-a-boo, every aeroplane flight the first aeroplane flight.

 

They arrived in different cars looking much unlike themselves. She headed up to the room first and left the door open and stripped all her clothes off to bathe. Somehow it seemed important that for their first time together without having to fold themselves in tight knots in backseats of cars or in bathroom stalls or in back offices that she be clean when she met him. When she finished she came out in the bathrobe to the sight of Sanggyun out on the deck with his arms folded across the railing and the wind stirring the stiff blonde peaks of his hair.

 

She hugged him from behind and could feel his pulse jumping even through the thick layer of looped terrycloth.

 

 _I’m nervous_ , his voice crackled.

 

 _Me too_ , she murmured.

 

Their suite faced a wide man-made canal. Out here in the boonies the land was still cheap so upscale branded properties like this could be built up quick but it didn’t mean two shakes about the land around it. A family of black wild pigs wandered along the canal snuffing through trash. Nightfall was coming quick and the lights of Gwangju proper were turning on. It felt like being on the bleeding edge of Seoul, looking in.

 

_Can we really—_

 

 _Yes_ , she said.

 

They went inside and got under the covers. The smell was of hotel soap and fresh greenness and something sharp and them that made Jiyoung’s mouth water. How wonderful it was to have his hands all over her under the sheets. He was still dressed and she wasn’t. The robe lay damp from her body and her hair under her quickly building heat. She loved being naked before him. He kissed her with all open eyes, and kissed her again, deeply the second time, as if he were finally letting go of his nerves. He nearly tore the buttons off his own shirt in unnotching them too quick.

 

 _Can I_ — and he trailed his lips down her sternum and her abdomen and breathed right above where it was hottest, two fingers already crooked inside the wet and sliding in and out of her slowly. When she said _yes, yes, yes_ he pressed his waiting mouth to her and made her cry.

 

Later they looked at each other in the dying light and he had tears in his eyes too. His voice was thick when he said that he was sorry he could barely do anything for her when she had done so much for him.

 

 _Like what_ , she laughed, wondering how he could say that and mean it.

 

All of this, he opened his arms to the blankets and the bed and the suite and the deck and the man-made canal and the winking city outside. At her, her hair wet and slicked back, her face glowing and flushed from her shower and from what he had done to her and what she had done to him. This, he said, and put his forehead to hers and cupped her face. Everything, he said.

 

He meant it.

 

 

#

 

  
It went on for a year.

 

In that time, Jiyoung learned what it was to feel invincible and ruthless and magnanimous. She learned what was forever and infinite and inevitable and she learned that she would never lose it. It was not a lesson she had expected to learn simply by following a hunger but it was one that once learned would not be forgotten.

 

She wished that she had known Kim Sanggyun before she had met her husband. She wished that she had met him first so that she could spend all the time in the world getting under his skin. So that they could break each other totally and completely and then let time and society rework the putty of their remains into acceptable humans humbled by the knowledge of true primordial intimacy. But you didn’t always get what you want.

 

All that said, it was one of the best years of her life.

 

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am enormously in awe of Kahi and how she created her career from nothing. She is a true inspiration. Let it be known that even if you are 29 you can still debut in a pop group. The lady is made of molten steel and nothing can stop her. 
> 
> But she and Sanggyun, together? The thought kills me. Kills me for how raw and terrible it is. It started off as a drabble for **all the places you might call home** and then would not leave me the f*ck alone. “But what happens next?” The muse whispered. “How did they get together? Do they have any more steamy moments? Does she feel guilty? How does Sanggyun think of all of this?” 
> 
> So here we are. 
> 
> Pretty sure this won’t be the last of this rarepair. There are like 3 other drabbles sitting on my computer featuring them. Kim Sanggyun really does have one of the widest mouths in K-pop. Kahi’s lips are pretty Julia Robertesque if you look.
> 
> If you’re still reading this mess that is the End Notes section then thank you for reading this far. 
> 
> **Time to write** | 4 hours 45 minutes  
>  _Writing is a labor of love. If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a kudo or a comment. ♡_


	2. backseat

 

 

"Why?" Sanggyun asks, a gruff syllable forced though clenched teeth. Below him, Kahi unzips his hoodie.

 

"Because I just do," is the reply, breathed against his neck. Simple, uninformative; loaded with some meaning and confidence that seems to come out of nowhere.

 

Then his hoodie is gone, another layer flayed away, and those clever fingers slip rake across the shirt beneath, clever fingers working at the buttons.

 

"Why," Sanggyun tries again, as his armor is pared away piece by piece. He doesn't remember twisting his hands into Kahi’s blouse. "Why do you...?"

 

"Shh," is the reply, whispered over his cheek, imploring but evasive. She throws the shirt to the front, where it lands on the steering wheel. Her fingers slip into the waistband of his pants. He doesn't remember resting his forehead in the hollow of Kahi’s throat.

 

"What will we do if—" he starts but can’t continue, his voice breaking hoarsely on the last word, rust flaking away.

 

Kahi’s fingers brush his chin, rasp against his stubble. "It's okay," is the reply.

 

"Are you sure?" He pleads.

 

"I know," Kahi says, kissing his brow. Her lips stay there.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Time to write** | 45 minutes  
>  _Writing is a labor of love. If you enjoyed this story, please consider leaving a kudo or a comment. ♡_


	3. The Getaway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kahi’s never actually lay down in a bed with Sanggyun. She proposes a getaway. Takes place during the year of their affair.

 

 

 

The 4:30pm train to Gwangju departs in four hours. The receptionist takes her duffel bag and wobbles under the weight of it to the back room for safekeeping.  


“Going somewhere fun?” Her hairdresser comes out and tucks the nylon bib around her. She looks like some kind of beautiful nun. Her long brown hair spills down it in glossy waves. “Is someone channeling Slimane-era YSL or what? I haven’t seen leather pants like that since the three years ago.”  


“I’m just going home for the weekend,” she says. She tells her hairdresser to cut it short and dye it blonde.  


“2013 era?” He says, referring to her ombré-streaked shag.  


“White blonde,” she says. “Short short.”  


“Wow,” he says. “What’s going on?”  


She shrugs. Her glee is almost too much to contain.  


“That’s too drastic,” he says, scissors crisping at empty air as he thinks. “It’ll set the tabloids wondering.”  


This makes Kahi snort. They’d do more than wonder if they knew what was really going on. “Fine,” she says. “What should I do?”  


“Let’s just do our usual,” he says sagely, having seen this kind of thing all too often. Client walks in, wants something crazy, like what kids half their age do and come back a week later crying, even the strong ones with bones of steel like Park Jiyoung. “In the back room I have a wig that’s exactly what you wanted. White blonde and short short. Try it on for a bit and then come back next time and see if you still want it. And don’t tell me what you did with it or where it’s been. Am I right when I say I’m safer not knowing?”  


Park Jiyoung does neither confirm nor deny.  


  
  
#  


  
It was her idea. After she’d smelled the new cologne and gotten him to fess deep about his new girlfriend she decided they needed some time together that wasn’t in a car and wasn’t parking lots and wasn’t just handjobs. She wanted to lie down. And if you want it you go and get it so she tells him one drive that she’s going to Gwangju three weeks from now, that she’s going by train, that she’s going alone.  


“To visit your parents?” Sanggyun asks.  


“It gets wet and cold there this time of year,” she says. “If you want to come, dress differently than you do.”  


  
  
#

  
  
  
The night before she leaves, she bounces her baby boy up and down for a whole three hours. Every time peek-a-boo is a new boo. Every time flying like an aeroplane is like the first time. She rolls around on the carpet and puts his stuffed polar bear in her mouth, her muffled laughs getting louder and louder as he tries to wrestle Peter from her.  


You’re in a good mood, Daddy calls from the kitchen.  


Mommy does not confirm nor deny.  


  
  
#

  


  
At the platform she sees him right away but he doesn’t her, so she stops to take it in.  


He is dressed differently than his usual. He is wearing a pair of olive khakis and brown leather shoes that fade to a darker color at the toe. Wireframe glasses that have no lenses are tucked into the shirt pocket of a light blue denim shirt buttoned to the hilt, tucked nearly primly into his trousers and his belt is brown and plain. He is sweating a little so he leaves his off-label puffer jacket which is a clean tone of copper unzipped. Save for the dirty blond shade of his hair and the empty piercing holes in his ears there is no hint of the rapper known as Sanggyun anywhere in this man.  


Until he catches her from the corner of his eye and his face fills with surprise and knowing and pleasure at the sight of her. He is about to come to her but she puts a finger to her lips.  


“Kahi? Kahi is that you?”  


She keeps her sunglasses on and smiles graciously at her friend who is pushing a stroller with a chubby baby girl dawdling her feet within it. This friend is from their mother’s group who sends her daughter to the day care that Park Jiyoung has been scouting for her baby boy. She is the saccharine type of person who entertains notions that their children might be married someday if only they are good enough friends in childhood.  


“Where’s Noah?”  


“With the nanny,” Jiyoung says. “I’m visiting my parents this weekend.”  


“Without Noah? And with that hair?” Her friend gasps, an attempt at a joke, an overture to be closer, to be in on the secret. Jiyoung’s unchanging expression makes her backpedal. “I mean, it’s very avant-garde.”  


Her friend says “avant-garde” in English. Kahi wrinkles her nose. Then she thinks that she must be nice for if this friend most likely only keeps secrets if they are powered by goodwill.  


“It’s just a wig,” she whispers. “Car is in the shop so I’m taking the train today. I’d rather not have the trouble from strangers, you know?” She lowers her sunglasses and winks at her friend who is not a stranger, of course not, and from the way her friend’s face flowers Jiyoung knows the secret is safe. “Are you coming or going?”  


“Going,” her friend says, dazed. “I mean, coming. I’m here to pick up my husband. He’s just getting back from a business trip.”  


“Oh? Where was he?”  


“The south—doing a presentation for supply chain folks down in Gwangju. Big contracts with Samsung these days,” her friend says proudly.  


“Really? That’s where I’m from, you know.” And Kahi unleashes a string of idiomatic expressions in gruff Jeolla that sends her friend into peals of laughter.  


“Don’t, don’t, you sound like him after he’s had too much soju.”  


“You can take the girl out of Jeolla, but you can’t take the Jeolla out of the girl.” Kahi mimes looking at her watch. A Van Cleef and Arpels number with a gold back and a slim leather strap, a present from her husband at their two-hundred day anniversary. The second hand points at the train. “Well, speaking of which.”  


“Oh yes, you’ve got to catch your train. It was so nice to see you. Say bye bye to Auntie Kahi,” she tells her daughter.  


“Don’t tell a soul, now.” Kahi pushes her sunglasses up her nose and holds a finger to her lips. “That means you too,” she bends down to the little girl in the stroller, who is staring dumb and wide-eyed and whose name Jiyoung can’t remember at all right now.  


“It’s our secret, right? It’s our secret.” coos the mother, pitching her voice high.  


_It sure is_ , Jiyoung thinks.  


  
  
#  


  
  
On the train, Sanggyun sits by the window. Kahi tosses her duffel bag overhead and sits down across in the cove across the aisle. They are facing each other at diagonal ends, both heads down in their phones the whole ride over.  


_u changed your hair_  


_*You changed your everything.*_  


_is it real_  


_*You can see later.*_  


_there’s alot i want to see later_  


_*Such as?*_  


_i want to see you sweat. i want to see you under me and over me. I want to kiss you all over your beautiful body until you can’t take it anymore. then when you just think you can’t that’s when i’ll put my cock in you and make you come._  


_*Oh? That was quick.*_  


_leaves enough time for the strawberries_  


_*Strawberries?*_  


_we got room service right?_  


_*Yes, we can order room service.*_  


_so after that i’ll start again. slow now. first time was quick bc i couldn’t wait to be inside you. you’re getting turned on aren’t you_  


_*Presumptuous boy. Why do you say that?*_  


_Because i can smell your sweet pussy from here._  
  
_it’s making me so hard._  
  
i want to put my lips on your nipples  
  
and circle my tongue around them  
  
and get your pussy nice and wet  
  
then i lift up your legs and throw them over my shoulder  
  
and flex my cock into you  
  
before pulling it almost all the way back out  
  
then sliding it back faster this time  
  
pumping your sopping wet little cunt  


And that kind of thing.  


  
  
#  


  
Sanggyun’s taxicab arrives just right behind Jiyoung’s. He takes a seat on a boxy armchair in front of the water fountain and digs in his pockets for coins to throw, trying not to look at her. The back of her neck prickles and she tucks a stray black hair back under the wig. There are a few receptions who are free, but she waits for one that isn’t fresh-faced to become free before she walks up.  


“How was your trip in?”  


“Very good, thanks.” This is the part that is the gamble.  


“Is this your first time staying with us?”  


The gamble is whether the bespectacled receptionist is old enough that he won’t have kept up with television or never heard of the biggest reality TV show in the nation. Whether he can keep his stupid mouth shut or if he’s going to be the kind of person who likes to brag to others for a living.  


“First time,” Jinyoung says. She leans one elbow on the counter and turns her face away. He moves very slowly and heaves great breaths that sound like he’s reached the end of his day or the end of his time.  


“Two key cards?”  


“Just the one,” she says.  


“Do you need help with your luggage?”  


“No, I’ve—I’ve just the one.”  


“Visiting friends?” The question isn’t unkind or overly solicitous. And with such an anonymous and generic question Jiyoung feels the glee bloom in her expression, a rascal running out of the bath still wet and wild-haired, and she is so in love with it that she can barely wrangle it down.  


“My family. Small place, though, so I com here. And yes. A friend.”  


“Well, that’s nice.” The receptionist hands her ID card back to her. She looks for a moment at the card. This was Park Jiyoung from nine years ago. In this photo, she wore her long black hair parted down the middle just like in her school photos. She wore no makeup. Something innocuous and nostalgic had seized her that day she had to get her picture taken. A part of her wanted to recall the old Jiyoung. Another thought, arrogantly, that if she made it big someday that she would need to hide behind something.  


“Please enjoy your stay with us,” the reception says, and bows.  


Jiyoung may have escaped recognition for the time being but the same could not be said of Sanggyun, who was currently signing something for a girl probably eighteen or so. The girl’s parents stood behind her as she spoke in quick tones about how she had voted for him and how she had wished he had made it to the finals and how she wished that he would be successful and thank you so much thank you so much.  


With a frantic look in her direction he said *help me* with his eyes. She laughed to herself. She could do nothing except watch him. Sometimes it was just like that between them.  


Her exuberance attracted the attention of another girl, and then another, and by the time a small crowd had formed itself around Kim Sanggyun, Park Jiyoung was done watching.  


* _Room 1905,_ * she texted him, and the elevator opened its doors for her with an obedient * _ding_ *.

  
  
#  
  


She sets her things down.  


The view of the room is expansive. She’d booked the biggest suite they had. Plush carpet lines the walls and marble in the kitchen. They face a wide man-made canal. Out here in the boonies the land is still cheap so upscale branded properties like this can be built but it doesn’t mean the land around it is developed. A family of black and pink wild pigs wanders along the canal, snuffing through trash. When nightfall comes there will only be the lights of the city and it will feel as if just on the bleeding edge of Seoul, looking in.  


On the coffee table in the living room is a tiny two-bite chocolate cake with a lacquered finish. Piped around the edge of the plate in boisterous, bubbly characters: Welcome Ms. Park. The chocolate cake does it: she wraps her arms around herself in disbelieving joy and shirks her arms up in a silent cheer and dances in front of the huge bay windows to some unheard song before she gathers herself.  


Jiyoung unpacks. There’s not much. Toiletries and cosmetics, a silk sleepgown, a pair of blue jeans, a white cotton blouse, a jacket, yoga pants, a sports bra, white ankle socks, and trainers for the gym. Casual clothes. Nobody kind of clothes. She’ll have to visit her parents tomorrow. _Why didn’t you just stay with us,_ her mother will grouse, but for now, for now—  


For now, she requires a shower. She leaves the front door ajar just ever so slightly and heads into the bathroom. Her wig has been itching at her scalp all day and she has been sweating. She takes off the wig and the plume of warmed salt wafts to her nose. She leaves the clothes where they fall off her body and runs the shower hot hot and looks at herself in the full-length mirror.  


Jiyoung is lean and taut, not an ounce of fat anywhere. She pinches a section of her abdomen and it comes away just skin. Her arms are toned from carrying her baby boy. She watches her throat swallow and her ribs move as she breathes until everything shiny is fogged over and the whole marble-gleaming bathroom is a ball of steam.  


  
  
#  
  


  
Kim Sanggyun is pacing the bedroom when she finishes her shower. She stops him mid-step and hugs him in her polar-white bathrobe and she can feel his pulse jumping even through the thick layer of looped terrycloth.  


_I’m nervous_ , his voice crackles.  


_Me too,_ she murmurs.  


_Can we—can we really—_  


_Yes_ , she says.  


They get under the covers. The smell was fresh but then it was of them, Kahi of hotel soap and Sanggyun of himself, that fresh green sharpness of him. How wonderful it was to have his hands all over her under the sheets. He was still dressed and she wasn’t. The robe lay damp from her body and her hair under her quickly building heat. She loved being naked before him. He kissed her with all open eyes, and kissed her again, deeply the second time, as if he were finally letting go of his nerves. He unnotches the top two buttons of his shirt and nearly tears them off in his quickness.  


“Can I—” and he trails his lips down her sternum and her abdomen and breathes right above where it is hottest, two fingers already crooked inside the heat and sliding in and out of her slowly. When she says _yes, yes, yes_ he presses his waiting mouth to her.  
  


  
#  
  


  
He is on the deck watching the sun go down over the canal when she wakes up. She comes up behind him barefoot and clothed in the bathrobe and hugs him from behind.

  
_Did you see the pigs?_ She asks.  


_Yeah. Watched them for a while. Now I can’t see them anymore._  


They look at what they can see, last light of the sun peeling over the canal and the bridge of cars coming from and going downtown leaving a pointillist trail of red and white lights in their wake.  


He shudders and shakes. She asks him what’s wrong and he turns around, his head hung and blinking his eyes furiously. He’s got tears in his eyes and his voice is thick when he says that he can’t, he can barely do anything for her but she’s done so much for him.  


_Like what_ , she says.  


_All of this_ , he gestures to the man-made canal and the winking city lights and the suite within and at her, her hair wet and slicked back, her face glowing and flushed from her shower. _This_ , he says, and puts his forehead to hers and cups her face. _Everything_ , he says.  


  
  
#

  
  
  
She keeps the wig for two months before returning it to her hairdresser.  


“So, are you finally ready for the big change?”  


“No,” she says softly. “Just the usual, please.”  


  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh I can’t believe I wrote more in this pairing. Rarest of rarepairs, hello and goodbye. I’ll see you again soon, the next time I am making anemic progress on Double Blind. 
> 
> **Time to write** : 2 hours 45 minutes


End file.
